Monsanto Was Its Own Ghostwriter for Some Safety Reviews

Academic papers vindicating its Roundup herbicide were written with the help of its employees.

By

Peter Waldman, Tiffany Stecker, and Joel Rosenblatt

Monsanto Co. started an agricultural revolution with its “Roundup Ready” seeds, genetically modified to resist the effects of its blockbuster herbicide called Roundup. That ability to kill weeds while leaving desirable crops intact helped the company turn Roundup’s active ingredient, the chemical glyphosate, into one of the world’s most-used crop chemicals. When that heavy use raised health concerns, Monsanto noted that the herbicide’s safety had repeatedly been vetted by outsiders. But now there’s new evidence that Monsanto’s claims of rigorous scientific review are suspect.

Dozens of internal Monsanto emails, released on Aug. 1 by plaintiffs’ lawyers who are suing the company, reveal how Monsanto worked with an outside consulting firm to induce the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to publish a purported “independent” review of Roundup’s health effects that appears to be anything but. The review, published along with four subpapers in a September 2016 special supplement, was aimed at rebutting the 2015 assessment by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. That finding by the cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization led California last month to list glyphosate as a known human carcinogen. It has also spurred more than 1,000 lawsuits in state and federal courts by plaintiffs who claim they contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma from Roundup exposure.

Monsanto disclosed that it paid Intertek Group Plc’s consulting unit to develop the review supplement, entitled “An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate.” But that was the extent of Monsanto’s involvement, the main article said. “The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company,” according to the review’s Declaration of Interest statement. “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”

Monsanto’s internal emails tell a different story. The correspondence shows the company’s chief of regulatory science, William Heydens, and other Monsanto scientists were heavily involved in organizing, reviewing, and editing drafts submitted by the outside experts. At one point, Heydens even vetoed explicit requests by some of the panelists to tone down what one of them wrote was the review’s “inflammatory” criticisms of IARC.

“An extensive revision of the summary article is necessary,” wrote that panelist, John Acquavella, an epidemiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, in a February 2016 email attached to his suggested edits of the draft. Alarmed, Ashley Roberts, the coordinator of the glyphosate papers for Intertek, forwarded Acquavella’s note and edits to Heydens at Monsanto, with the warning: “Please take a look at the latest from the epi(demiology) group!!!!”

Heydens reedited Acquavella’s edits, arguing in six different notes in the draft’s margin that statements Acquavella had found inflammatory were not and should not be changed, despite the author’s requests. In the published article, Heydens’s edits prevailed. In an interview, Acquavella says that he was satisfied with the review’s final tone. According to an invoice he sent Monsanto, he billed the company $20,700 for a single month’s work on the review, which took nearly a year to complete.

Monsanto defends the review’s independence. Monsanto did only “cosmetic editing” of the Intertek papers and nothing “substantive” to alter panelists’ conclusions, says Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president for global strategy. While the “choice of words” in the Declaration of Interest “was not ideal,” he says, “it didn’t change the science.”

In July 2016, the journal’s editor, Roger McClellan, emailed his final instructions to Roberts at Intertek on what the paper’s Acknowledgment and Declaration of Interest statements should include. “I want them to be as clear and transparent as possible,” he wrote. “At the end of the day I want the most aggressive critics of Monsanto, your organization and each of the authors to read them and say—Damn, they covered all the points we intended to raise.”

Specifically, McClellan told Roberts to make clear how the panelists were hired—“ie by Intertek,” McClellan wrote. “If you can say without consultation with Monsanto, that would be great. If there was any review of the reports by Monsanto or their legal representatives, that needs to be disclosed.”

Roberts forwarded McClellan’s emails, along with a more technical question, to Heydens, who responded, “Good grief.” The Declaration of Interest statement was rewritten per McClellan’s instructions, despite being untrue. There was no mention of the company’s participation in the editing.

In response to questions, McClellan wrote in an email on Aug. 7 that he’d been unaware of the Monsanto documents and has forwarded the matter to the journal’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, in Abingdon, England. “These are serious accusations relative to scientific publishing canons and deserve very careful investigation,” he wrote. “I can assure you that Taylor and Francis, as the publisher, and I, as the Scientific Editor of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, will carefully investigate the matter and take appropriate action.” A Taylor & Francis spokeswoman says it has begun an investigation.

The Monsanto documents, more than 70 in all, were obtained through pretrial discovery and posted online by some of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who claim Monsanto missed a 30-day window to object to their release. Monsanto says it was blindsided by the disclosures and has asked U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco to order the documents pulled from the web and to punish the attorneys for violating confidentiality orders. Says Monsanto’s Partridge: “It’s unfortunate these lawyers are grandstanding at the expense of their clients’ interests.”

Other emails show that Monsanto’s lead toxicologist, Donna Farmer, was removed as a co-author of a 2011 study on glyphosate’s reproductive effects, but not before she made substantial changes and additions to the paper behind the scenes. The study, published in Taylor & Francis’s Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, served to counter findings that glyphosate hampers human reproduction and development. Partridge says Farmer’s contributions didn’t warrant authorship credit. While almost all of her revisions made it into the published paper, her name doesn’t even show up in the acknowledgments.

BOTTOM LINE – Monsanto has long noted that independent scientists have vouched for the safety of its Roundup herbicide. Court data show its employees edited some of those reviews.

I have been following the discussion about vaccines for a while now, if you have a chance to watch Ty Bollingers videos “The truth about vaccines” I urge you to do it – really important information!
One of the (many) things they talked about was the polio vaccine – here’s an article about that…

History is a powerful thing. If you accurately tell the story of an event that occurred, you get one picture, one understanding of it. Leave one tiny little detail out, however, and the whole picture changes. You can get thousands of details right, but get one wrong, or simply omit telling it, and an historical event can become so distorted that it becomes a lie. Take the story of the Salk inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). During the first half of the 1950s, Jonas Salk, MD developed the first injectable vaccine against polio containing inactivated, or “killed”, strains of the poliovirus.

As a dead, rather than live, virus vaccine, Dr. Salk’s IPV supposedly carried no risk of giving recipients “vaccine-associated polio paralysis.”1 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “IPV is produced from wild-type poliovirus strains of each serotype that have been inactivated (killed) with formalin.”2

Here’s that little detail, though. The poliovirus that Dr. Salk killed with formalin, or formaldehyde, were not always killed; they sometimes only appeared to be killed.

Live poliovirus, which was put in an injectable vaccine, would appear to be inactivated right after it was made, but sometimes it would ‘resurrect’ in the vial… In essence, the formaldehyde did not kill off all the polioviruses in these vaccines, which led to live polio viruses being injected. As a result, more people developed paralysis from the vaccine in 1955 than would have developed it from a wild, normal natural poliovirus.3

Oops.

Field trials for the Salk vaccine were conducted on more than 1,800,000 children in the United States in 1954.4 Sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), now known as the March of Dimes, “623,972 schoolchildren were injected with vaccine or placebo, and more than a million others participated as ‘observed’ controls.’5

On April 12, 1955, Thomas Francis Jr., MD, director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, announced to the world that the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent,”—that it was “up to 90%” effective in preventing paralytic polio. Dr. Francis had been one of Dr. Salk’s professors at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology where Salk did his postgraduate training.4

During mid-April of 1955, about 400,000 people—mostly schoolchildren—in the U.S. were vaccinated with the Salk vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories.6 It turns out that more than 200,000 of these children, living in five western and midwestern states (Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico7), were injected with vaccines “in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective.” The Cutter-produced vaccines ended up causing 40,000 cases of polio. It severely paralyzed 200 children and killed 10.8

The first of these cases to be reported was that of a young girl named Susan Pierce, who had received the vaccine on April 18, 1955.7

Five days later, she developed fever and neck stiffness. Six days later, her left arm was paralyzed. Seven days later, she was placed in an iron lung, and nine days later, she was dead.7

In his book The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis, Paul Offit, MD writes, “Seventy-five percent of Cutter’s victims were paralyzed for the rest of their lives.” A team led by epidemiologisit Alexander Langmuir of the Communicable Diseases Center (now the CDC) in Atlanta, GA determined that “the disease caused by Cutter’s vaccine was worse than the disease caused by natural polio virus,” adds Dr. Offit.7

Children given Cutter’s vaccine were more likely to be paralyzed in their arms, more likely to suffer severe and permanent paralysis, more likely to require breathing assistance in iron lungs, and more likely to die than children naturally infected with polio.7

The so-called “Cutter Incident” led to the recall of the Cutter vaccine and the eventual replacement of the Salk IPV with the attenuated (weakened) live oral polio vaccine (OPV) developed by Albert Sabin, MD and introduced in 1963. (A modified inactivated Salk vaccine was re-introduced in the 1990s after the only cases of polio occurring in the U.S. were vaccine strain polio cases because live OPV can cause vaccine strain polio in the recipient or a close contact of a recently vaccinated person shedding live vaccine strain polio virus in body fluids.)8

But the fact that some improperly inactivated lots of the original polio vaccine paralyzed and killed American children was concealed from the public for a long time.

In their book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, Suzanne Humphries, MD and Roman Bystrianyk write, “You may be wondering how this information was concealed from the public for nearly fifty years. Congressman Percy Priest ordered and chaired a full investigation of the vaccine controversy.”)9 According to them, Congressman Priest, who represented the 6th District of Tennessee, admitted in 1956 that,

… in the previous year (1955) many responsible persons had felt that the public should be spared the ordeal of ‘knowledge about controversy.’ If word ever got out that the Public Health Service had actually done something damaging to the health of the American people, the consequences would b terrible… We felt that no lasting good could come to science or the public if the Public Health Services were discredited.”9

Two key points to note here. First, the problem with the Cutter-produced vaccine should have come as a surprise to the scientists and public health officials who were familiar with the development of the Salk IPV. According to Dr. Humphries and Bystrianyk:

The Salk invention was an injectable, supposedly formaldehyde-inactivated version of poliovirus vaccine. There were serious problems with the viral inactivation process that were known by insiders from the outset of the vaccine’s development.9

Unfortunately, whenever scientists involved in the vaccine’s development raised concerns that poliovirus had not been fully killed, they were “rapidly subdued.”9

As a result of ignoring the warnings by highly qualified scientists who repeatedly and publicly explained why and how the inactivation process was flawed from the beginning, the vaccine virus needlessly infected, paralyzed, and killed children and their household contacts.9

Secondly, Cutter Laboratories was not the only manufacturer of the the Salk IPV. Wyeth Laboratories also produced a defective Salk vaccine that caused paralysis. Other pharmaceutical companies are believed to have done so, as well. But only Cutter’s vaccine was recalled. This means that, potentially, tens of millions of doses of improperly inactivated “live” Salk vaccine were sold and injected into children in the U.S. and around the world until the “inactivated” Salk vaccine was replaced by the live oral Sabin vaccine in the early-1960s.

This may help explain, at least partially, why the cases of polio in the U.S. increased by 50% from 1957 to 1958, and by 80% between 1958 and 1959.10 According to Bernard Greenberg, PhD, head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health:

In five New England states cases of polio roughly doubled after polio vaccine was introduced. Nevertheless in the midst of the polio panic of the 1950s, with pressure to find a magic bullet, statistics were manipulated by health authorities to give the quite the opposite impression.10

Keep in mind that these dramatic increases in polio following the introduction of the Salk IPV occurred shortly after the U.S. government had already significantly relaxed its guidelines for diagnosing polio. In 1954, the government redefined polio. I wrote about this other little detail of history that has been widely overlooked in my article “Polio Wasn’t Vanquished, It Was Redefined.”11 Dr. Greenberg explained this classic example of government sleight of hand…

In order to qualify for classification as paralytic poliomyelitis, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days after the onset of the disease. Prior to 1954, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for only 24 hours. Laboratory confirmation and the presence of residual paralysis were not required. After 1954, residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days and again 50 to 70 days after the onset of the disease. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer lasting paralysis.12

We can only imagine how much worse the official number of polio cases would have been during the second half of the 1950s had the same diagnosis standard continued to be followed, rather than arbitrarily changed in midstream. By any measure, the early Salk polio vaccine campaigns cannot be termed an unqualified “success.” Yet, since the story has been so repeatedly, utterly inaccurately told, our understanding of the history of the polio vaccine “miracle” is that it is one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. And, as we have seen with the Sabin live oral polio vaccine that continues to cause vaccine strain polio cases around the world, there are big questions about how high the price has been—and will continue to be—for using that polio vaccine as well.

History is indeed a powerful thing. If you teach it wrong for more than half a century, it is hard to unteach, because a particular version of a story can become so ingrained in the public’s collective memory that few can accept that what we’ve come to believe to be an unquestioned scientific truth is, in fact, a myth.

And if that sacred cow is an illusion, then what else may we have gotten wrong along the way? Suddenly, mainstream vaccine science doesn’t feel so certain, so… scientific.

Perhaps the most egregious example of clever sleight of hand (… not to mention the outright, blatant rewriting of history) on the part of public health officials in the United States occurred in 1954 when the U.S. government changed the diagnostic criteria for polio.1 It was the year that medical researcher and virologist Jonas Salk produced his inactivated injectable polio vaccine ((IPV). The vaccine was licensed in 1955 and began to be used to inoculate millions of children against polio.

The Salk vaccine has been widely hailed as the vanquisher of polio, and it is commonly used as the shining example of how vaccines are the miracle drugs for combating infectious diseases… and now even against diseases that are not infectious. Pick any disease, illness or disorder you want. You got cancer, cholera, peanut allergies, stress, obesity… we’ll develop a vaccine for it.

What the apologists for the Salk vaccine regurgitate from a common script (… some might say scripture) is that before the vaccine was introduced and tested on one million children—the so-called “Polio Pioneers”—in 19542 more than 50,000 people in the U.S. were contracting polio each year, and that by the end of the 1950s the numbers were down to less than 10,000.3 Ergo, the Salk vaccine saved the U.S. from polio. Open and shut case.

Hmm, not so fast.

What is conveniently omitted from this heroic story is that the reason the number of polio cases in the U.S. dropped so precipitously following the mass introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1955 was not medical, but rather administrative. Yes it’s true, in 1952 there were 52,879 reported cases of polio in the U.S. And yes, in 1955 the number went down to 28,985, and by 1959 it had dropped to 8,425.3But first of all, it’s important to note that the numbers were already declining significantly prior to the initial use of the Salk vaccine. In 1953, there were 35,592 cases of polio in the U.S.3 So there were other things going on in the U.S. at the time totally unrelated to the Salk vaccine.

More importantly, though, in 1954 the U.S. government simply redefined polio. Yes, the government can do that. It does this kind of stuff occasionally in order to help it meet its public policy objectives when it is unable to actually achieve them. How often have you heard of Congress playing smoke and mirrors, gimmicks with the national budget deficit, or on the issue of the unemployment rate? Exactly.

When it comes to government and public policy, the truth is seldom absolute. That’s just the nature of the beast.

According to Dr. Bernard Greenberg, head of the Department of Biostatistics of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health:

In order to qualify for classification as paralytic poliomyelitis, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days after the onset of the disease. Prior to 1954, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for only 24 hours. Laboratory confirmation and the presence of residual paralysis were not required. After 1954, residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days and again 50 to 70 days after the onset of the disease. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer lasting paralysis.1

Under the new definition of polio, thousands of cases which would have previously been counted as polio would no longer be counted as polio. The change in the definition laid the groundwork for creating the impression that the Salk vaccine was effective.4

So as radio broadcaster Paul Harvey used to say for decades at the close of each of his charming commentaries, “And now you know… the rest of the story.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed two cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 (cVDPV1) in the Ukraine. The cases involved a four-year old child and a 10-month old child in the Zakarpatskaya region of southwestern Ukraine. The onset of paralysis occurred on June 30 and July 7, 2015.1 According to the WHO, the emergence of cVDPV1 was due to “inadequate vaccination coverage” in the Ukraine, as “only 50% of children [in the country] were fully immunized against polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases.”1

Interestingly, the cVDPV1, which is a rare, mutated form of the poliovirus, is caused by the oral polio vaccine itself. A recent article in The Washington Post by Ariana Eunjung Cha notes:

Oral polio vaccines contain a weakened form of the virus that activates an immune response in the body so that it builds up antibodies to protect itself. But it takes some time for this to happen, and meanwhile the virus replicates in the intestines and can be excreted by the person immunized and can spread to others in the community.2

So the take-away point here—or at least the one that logically might elicit the most concern—should be the fact that people vaccinated against the virus can actually excrete (or “shed”) the virus and infect other people. Of course, this is counter-intuitive, because that would mean that vaccinating people to prevent infectious diseases from spreading might actually have the opposite effect.

Sometimes the weakened vaccine strain live virus can mutate and regain virulence, including neurovirulence, which significantly raises risks of serious complications from vaccine strain virus infection. Healthy persons can suffer complications from vaccine strain viral infection but children and adults with immunodeficiency are more likely to develop complications after they receive live virus vaccines or come in close contact with a person who is shedding vaccine strain live virus.3

Just like people with viral infections can shed and transmit wild-type virus, people given live virus vaccines can shed and transmit vaccine strain live attenuated virus. Like wild-type virus, vaccine strain live virus can be shed in body fluids, such as saliva, nasal and throat secretions, breastmilk, urine and blood, stool, and skin lesions. Shedding after vaccination with live virus vaccines may continue for days, weeks or months, depending upon the vaccine and the health or other individual host factors of the vaccinated person.4

Now, there’s your newsworthy story.

Instead, the story is seemingly being manipulated in a way that attributes the paralysis of the two children, not on the vaccine which led to the cVDPV1, but to the idea that in under-vaccinated populations “the vaccine-virus can circulate for long time, 12 months or longer, and genetically change into a more virulent form that can paralyze.”2 This makes it easier for the WHO and other health authorities to make their case for increasingly higher levels of vaccination. The WHO stresses that the “emergence of cVDPV strains underscores the importance of maintaining high levels of routine vaccination coverage.”1

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has joined the WHO in calling for parents in the Ukraine to vaccinate following the confirmed polio outbreak.5 Remember now, we’re talking about twochildren. Two. An article by the United Nations News Centre references a press release by UNICEF…

‘The only effective way to protect children from polio is vaccination,’ stressed UNICEF’s representative in Ukraine, Giovanna Barberis, in a press release. ‘The available vaccines supplied by UNICEF should be used as soon as possible to ensure children are protected from polio in Ukraine.’5

The world’s major media sources are taking their cues directly from the WHO without even bothering to ask the painfully obvious question, “Isn’t it a serious problem when you have vaccines causing viruses to mutate and become more dangerous than the original viruses they were designed to protect against?” The second paragraph of the Reuters story by Tom Miles, for example, reads, “The WHO said Ukraine had been at particular risk of an outbreak because of inadequate vaccination coverage. In 2014, only 50 percent of children were fully immunized against polio and other preventable diseases, it said.”6

The second paragraph of the Associated Press (AP) story reads, “Health officials have warned for years that Ukraine was at risk of a polio epidemic because of low vaccination rates. The supply of vaccine has been spotty because of corruption and inefficiency, and many parents resist vaccinating their children because of fears about the procedure.” Another version goes, “Health officials had warned Ukraine was at high risk of a polio outbreak due to its low vaccination rates; only half of children were immunized against diseases like polio last year.”

So naturally many major newspapers simply reprint this and disseminate it to their audiences, stamping the piece with their own unique headline. There’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s “Ukraine: sufficient vaccine coming to block polio outbreak.”7 There’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s “World Health Organization: 2 polio cases found in Ukraine, caused by mutated virus in vaccine.”8

Then there are those publications like Forbes that actually go to the trouble of writing their own story, using the material provided by the WHO and the AP. They not only repeat the party line within their article, but actually feature it in their headline: “Polio Outbreak In Ukraine Is Grim Reminder Of Need For Continued Vigilance.”9

Predictably, the second paragraph reads:

The outbreak in Ukraine arose from vaccinations in country, World Health Organization spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer explained by email, ‘This strain arose in Ukraine, due to significant vaccination coverage gaps in the country. As many as 50% of children are under- or unimmunized, so there are many susceptible children, and this increases the risk of polio re-emerging or being re-introduced. This further underscores the danger of polio until it is eradicated completely. The best thing countries can do to protect themselves is to maintain high vaccination coverage.’9

To his credit, Donald G. McNeil Jr. of The New York Times started his piece “Polio Paralyzes 2 Children in West Ukraine Outbreak” with a more substantive focus. The third and fourth paragraph go as follows:

The two children, an infant and a 4-year-old, were not paralyzed by the “wild-type virus” that is now known to be circulating only in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but by a strain derived from the oral polio vaccine itself.10

The oral vaccine contains three strains of weakened live virus, and very occasionally—the WHO estimates it as once in a million vaccinations—one mutates to become more virulent. Then, like wild virus, it can be shed in feces and spread to others in sewage.10

Ironically, despite the WHO’s confirmation, it’s not even clear yet that the two cases in the Ukraine are polio. A Russia Today (RT) report cites local authorities in the country as denying a “definitive diagnosis” of polio. According to RT:

[The polio diagnosis] ‘was not confirmed’ by medical trials in Kiev and Moscow. Regional officials told Ukrainian media the symptoms only ‘resembled’ polio, but it could in fact be acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), recorded in the region up to five times on a yearly basis.

Thus, it appears the WHO is both emphasizing the wrong point and may be jumping the gun a bit on this story. Meanwhile, the corporate media follows along passively.

Vaccines are a really controversial thing, and they are discussed more and more now, make sure that you get information not just from Big Pharma, so I wanted to share some articles, blogposts and videos now and then – this is a blogpost from Marco Cáceres di Iorio…

MARCO CÁCERES DI IORIO

History is a powerful thing. If you accurately tell the story of an event that occurred, you get one picture, one understanding of it. Leave one tiny little detail out, however, and the whole picture changes. You can get thousands of details right, but get one wrong, or simply omit telling it, and an historical event can become so distorted that it becomes a lie. Take the story of the Salk inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). During the first half of the 1950s, Jonas Salk, MD developed the first injectable vaccine against polio containing inactivated, or “killed”, strains of the poliovirus.

As a dead, rather than live, virus vaccine, Dr. Salk’s IPV supposedly carried no risk of giving recipients “vaccine-associated polio paralysis.”1 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “IPV is produced from wild-type poliovirus strains of each serotype that have been inactivated (killed) with formalin.”2

Here’s that little detail, though. The poliovirus that Dr. Salk killed with formalin, or formaldehyde, were not always killed; they sometimes only appeared to be killed.

Live poliovirus, which was put in an injectable vaccine, would appear to be inactivated right after it was made, but sometimes it would ‘resurrect’ in the vial… In essence, the formaldehyde did not kill off all the polioviruses in these vaccines, which led to live polio viruses being injected. As a result, more people developed paralysis from the vaccine in 1955 than would have developed it from a wild, normal natural poliovirus.3

Oops.

Field trials for the Salk vaccine were conducted on more than 1,800,000 children in the United States in 1954.4 Sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), now known as the March of Dimes, “623,972 schoolchildren were injected with vaccine or placebo, and more than a million others participated as ‘observed’ controls.’5

On April 12, 1955, Thomas Francis Jr., MD, director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, announced to the world that the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent,”—that it was “up to 90%” effective in preventing paralytic polio. Dr. Francis had been one of Dr. Salk’s professors at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology where Salk did his postgraduate training.4

During mid-April of 1955, about 400,000 people—mostly schoolchildren—in the U.S. were vaccinated with the Salk vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories.6 It turns out that more than 200,000 of these children, living in five western and midwestern states (Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico7), were injected with vaccines “in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective.” The Cutter-produced vaccines ended up causing 40,000 cases of polio. It severely paralyzed 200 children and killed 10.8

The first of these cases to be reported was that of a young girl named Susan Pierce, who had received the vaccine on April 18, 1955.7

Five days later, she developed fever and neck stiffness. Six days later, her left arm was paralyzed. Seven days later, she was placed in an iron lung, and nine days later, she was dead.7

In his book The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis, Paul Offit, MD writes, “Seventy-five percent of Cutter’s victims were paralyzed for the rest of their lives.” A team led by epidemiologisit Alexander Langmuir of the Communicable Diseases Center (now the CDC) in Atlanta, GA determined that “the disease caused by Cutter’s vaccine was worse than the disease caused by natural polio virus,” adds Dr. Offit.7

Children given Cutter’s vaccine were more likely to be paralyzed in their arms, more likely to suffer severe and permanent paralysis, more likely to require breathing assistance in iron lungs, and more likely to die than children naturally infected with polio.7

The so-called “Cutter Incident” led to the recall of the Cutter vaccine and the eventual replacement of the Salk IPV with the attenuated (weakened) live oral polio vaccine (OPV) developed by Albert Sabin, MD and introduced in 1963. (A modified inactivated Salk vaccine was re-introduced in the 1990s after the only cases of polio occurring in the U.S. were vaccine strain polio cases because live OPV can cause vaccine strain polio in the recipient or a close contact of a recently vaccinated person shedding live vaccine strain polio virus in body fluids.)8

But the fact that some improperly inactivated lots of the original polio vaccine paralyzed and killed American children was concealed from the public for a long time.

In their book Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, Suzanne Humphries, MD and Roman Bystrianyk write, “You may be wondering how this information was concealed from the public for nearly fifty years. Congressman Percy Priest ordered and chaired a full investigation of the vaccine controversy.”)9 According to them, Congressman Priest, who represented the 6th District of Tennessee, admitted in 1956 that,

… in the previous year (1955) many responsible persons had felt that the public should be spared the ordeal of ‘knowledge about controversy.’ If word ever got out that the Public Health Service had actually done something damaging to the health of the American people, the consequences would b terrible… We felt that no lasting good could come to science or the public if the Public Health Services were discredited.”9

Two key points to note here. First, the problem with the Cutter-produced vaccine should have come as a surprise to the scientists and public health officials who were familiar with the development of the Salk IPV. According to Dr. Humphries and Bystrianyk:

The Salk invention was an injectable, supposedly formaldehyde-inactivated version of poliovirus vaccine. There were serious problems with the viral inactivation process that were known by insiders from the outset of the vaccine’s development.9

Unfortunately, whenever scientists involved in the vaccine’s development raised concerns that poliovirus had not been fully killed, they were “rapidly subdued.”9

As a result of ignoring the warnings by highly qualified scientists who repeatedly and publicly explained why and how the inactivation process was flawed from the beginning, the vaccine virus needlessly infected, paralyzed, and killed children and their household contacts.9

Secondly, Cutter Laboratories was not the only manufacturer of the the Salk IPV. Wyeth Laboratories also produced a defective Salk vaccine that caused paralysis. Other pharmaceutical companies are believed to have done so, as well. But only Cutter’s vaccine was recalled. This means that, potentially, tens of millions of doses of improperly inactivated “live” Salk vaccine were sold and injected into children in the U.S. and around the world until the “inactivated” Salk vaccine was replaced by the live oral Sabin vaccine in the early-1960s.

This may help explain, at least partially, why the cases of polio in the U.S. increased by 50% from 1957 to 1958, and by 80% between 1958 and 1959.10 According to Bernard Greenberg, PhD, head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health:

In five New England states cases of polio roughly doubled after polio vaccine was introduced. Nevertheless in the midst of the polio panic of the 1950s, with pressure to find a magic bullet, statistics were manipulated by health authorities to give the quite the opposite impression.10

Keep in mind that these dramatic increases in polio following the introduction of the Salk IPV occurred shortly after the U.S. government had already significantly relaxed its guidelines for diagnosing polio. In 1954, the government redefined polio. I wrote about this other little detail of history that has been widely overlooked in my article “Polio Wasn’t Vanquished, It Was Redefined.”11 Dr. Greenberg explained this classic example of government sleight of hand…

In order to qualify for classification as paralytic poliomyelitis, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days after the onset of the disease. Prior to 1954, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for only 24 hours. Laboratory confirmation and the presence of residual paralysis were not required. After 1954, residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days and again 50 to 70 days after the onset of the disease. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer lasting paralysis.12

We can only imagine how much worse the official number of polio cases would have been during the second half of the 1950s had the same diagnosis standard continued to be followed, rather than arbitrarily changed in midstream. By any measure, the early Salk polio vaccine campaigns cannot be termed an unqualified “success.” Yet, since the story has been so repeatedly, utterly inaccurately told, our understanding of the history of the polio vaccine “miracle” is that it is one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. And, as we have seen with the Sabin live oral polio vaccine that continues to cause vaccine strain polio cases around the world, there are big questions about how high the price has been—and will continue to be—for using that polio vaccine as well.

History is indeed a powerful thing. If you teach it wrong for more than half a century, it is hard to unteach, because a particular version of a story can become so ingrained in the public’s collective memory that few can accept that what we’ve come to believe to be an unquestioned scientific truth is, in fact, a myth.

And if that sacred cow is an illusion, then what else may we have gotten wrong along the way? Suddenly, mainstream vaccine science doesn’t feel so certain, so… scientific.

When I started to leave out gluten from my diet I was eating the so called “gluten-free” products, a lot of them with wheat starch and such things – I felt that I actually got more sick from eating those products, so I had to stop eating things like that completely. This is another post from Dr William Davis about that subject:

Kyla posted this question on the Wheat Belly Facebook page. Her story so perfectly illustrates some of the problems with gluten-free foods that I’m sharing it here. I started the wheat free diet at the end of May. I lost over 8 1/2 inches all over during June and at the end that month I found the “gluten free/wheat free” section at the grocery store. Not thinking about the fact that it had rice flour, I found things I really liked. Problem is I stopped losing and actually gained an inch back, and started getting incredibly bad headaches that would last for hours. Could it be the rice flour? Yes, Kyla: The increase in fat weight and headaches can most definitely be blamed on the rice flour. We’ve discussed why such gluten-free replacements are unhealthy, but let’s do so again in some greater detail. There are four common flours used to replace wheat and gluten to recreate baked products like breads, pasta, and cookies:

Rice flour (and brown rice flour)

Potato flour

Cornstarch

Tapioca starch

You already know that wheat products raise blood sugar to high levels, such that 2 slices of whole wheat bread raises blood sugar higher than 6 teaspoons of table sugar. (Don’t believe it? It’s in every table of glycemic index. Get yourself an inexpensive glucose meter and test strips and check your blood sugar 30-60 minutes after consuming either: You will see high values after sugar, higher values after whole wheat bread.) What foods are worse than wheat? Rice flour, potato flour, cornstarch, and tapioca starch. Every time blood sugars rise to high levels, high insulin levels follow. Insulin blocks mobilization of fat and encourages fat deposition. So wheat makes you grow fat, especially the inflammatory visceral fat variety–and so do these gluten-free flours and starches. That’s why I call these gluten-free replacement ingredients junk carbs. Let me state this unequivocally: Gluten-free foods made with these junk carb ingredients make you fat. The values below would be a representative blood sugar experience 30-60 minutes after consumption of these foods: Fasting blood glucoose: 100 mg/dl After a whole wheat bagel: 167 mg/dl After a whole grain gluten-free bagel: 189 mg/dl These would be typical values in a non-diabetic. People with diabetes typically range even higher. Every time blood sugar ranges above 100 mg/dl, you glycate proteins, i.e,. you glucose-modify proteins irreversibly. If the proteins in the lenses of your eyes are glycated, they create opacities that, over time, result in cataracts. If the proteins in the cartilage of your knees and hips are glycated, cartilage becomes increasingly brittle, eroding over time and leading to arthritis. If the proteins in your LDL particles in the bloodstream are glycated, they are much more adherent to artery walls and cause atherosclerosis and heart attack. If you glycate the proteins in the skin layers, you get brittle skin and age spots. Glycation is a body-wide process and, the higher the blood sugar, the greater the glycation. It doesn’t end there. As Kyla observed, rice flour had effects that could not be blamed on blood sugar phenomena, headaches in her case. In addition to its exceptional glycemic potential, rice has a small quantity of wheat germ agglutinin (even though it is in rice) that is inflammatory and a direct bowel toxin. It also contains inorganic arsenic, a finding that had the FDA commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg hemming and hawing recently. FDA conclusion: levels detected did not provoke acutetoxicity, even though the highest levels (30 mcg per serving in rice bran cereal) overlap with the toxic levels that occur in water in some parts of the world (WHO), but chronic toxicity is still an uncertainty. Among the effects of acute inorganic arsenic toxicity are neurological phenomena, such as headaches. If her gluten-free products were made with cornstarch, then there are other potential problems. Even though corn is technically classified as “gluten-free,” nobody tells you that the zein protein of corn overlaps substantially in amino acid structure with the gliadinproteins of wheat, rye, and barley. Many of effects triggered by wheat gliadin, such as increased intestinal permeability and anti-gliadin antibody autoimmune phenomena, are also triggered by the zein protein of corn. This explains why, for instance, in animal models of type 1 diabetes, 15% of animals eating wheat- and cornstarch-free chow develop the disease, while 57-70% of animals develop type 1 diabetes if they consume either corn- or wheat-containing chow. And, because the majority of corn is now genetically-modified, it means that most corn products contain residues of the herbicides glyphosate and/or Bt toxin, as well as all the uncertainties introduced by the insertion of new genes, changes both genetic and epigenetic. In other words, the gluten-free industry have chosen to dig this deep hole for themselves, resorting to such junk ingredients to replace wheat and gluten. Don’t fall for it. And if you hear me repeating this over and over and over again, it is because the gluten-free message continues to propagate and engage many people who enjoy initial health benefits from elimination of wheat and gluten, just as Kyla did, only to then experience health problems because of the gluten-free bagels or breads you thought were good. 100% gluten-free usually means 100% awful.